What are the cons and pros of bundling webdriver-io with the main application at test? The question is based on the assumption that webdriver-io could be run as a stand-alone application, but also bundled together with the main application (similar to Cypress).
WebdriverIO comes in two flavors , one is runner and another is standalone.
Runner is a framework which has all boiler plate codes for reporting , integration etc already done for you.
standalone mode is just like selenium , its just a http client library that calls w3c protocol under the hood .
so what flavor you use depends on your use case. For end to end test we usually prefer runner . while if you already have a framework in place then you can use wdio standalone as a replacement of webdriverjs